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Faber and Faber
In Memoriam: Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007)
Ingmar Bergman died on the island of Fårö on July 30 2007. His reputation as one of the greatest of directors made his work forbidding to some filmgoers, so perhaps the most delightful tribute ever paid to him was that of his late friend Federico Fellini, who once described Bergman as "a mixture of magician and prestidigitateur, of prophet and clown, tie salesman and priest who preaches. That's what an entertainer should be."
In 1968 Bergman sat down with three Swedish film journalists to undertake a career-length interview about his body of work, to be published as Bergman on Bergman. In due course the book was gratefully received by legions of Bergman fans; and yet the man himself grew to feel dissatisfied by his contribution to it, as he would later confess in a second and more scrupulous account of his oeuvre, published in Sweden as Bilder and in the UK, translated by Marianne Ruuth, as Images: My Life in Film (Faber and Faber, new edition, 2001.) In the following extracts Bergman describes the anxiety he felt in attempting to revisit his films in definitive fashion; and comments on three of his most famous productions–The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, and Persona.
I decided in 1983 to "hang up" my camera. By then I was able to view my work as a whole and began to realize that I did not mind talking about my past. People were showing genuine interest in my films, not just to be polite or in order to attack me; since I had retired, I was guaranteed harmless.
Now and then my friend Lasse Bergström and I spoke about doing a new Bergman on Bergman book–one that would be more truthful, more objective. Bergström would ask the questions, and I would talk, and that would be the only similarity to the earlier book. We kept encouraging each other to do it, and all of a sudden we found ourselves going ahead with it.
What I had not been able to anticipate was that this act of looking back would, at times, turn into a murderous and painful business. Murderous and painful give a rather violent impression, but those are the best words I can find for it.
For some reason that had never occurred to me before, I have always avoided re-screening my old movies. Whenever I have had to do so or done so out of curiosity, I have been, without exception and no matter which film it was, nervous and upset, and have felt like going out to take a leak, like running to the toilet. I have been overwhelmed with anxiety, felt like crying, been afraid, unhappy, nostalgic, sentimental, and so on. Owing to this unfortunate conjunction of tumultuous feelings, I have, understandably, tended to avoid my movies. Still, I have felt kindly toward them, even the bad ones: I know that I did my best at the time and that each was in its own way truly interesting . . . So I set out to stroll for a while down the pleasantly lighted corridors of memory.
It therefore became necessary to look at my films again, and I thought: All that happened a long time ago. Now I'll be able to handle the emotional challenge. I'll be able to eliminate some of my works immediately. Let Lasse Bergström look at them by himself. After all, he's a film critic. He's seen his share of good and bad without becoming hardened.
Watching forty years of my work over the span of one year turned out to be unexpectedly upsetting, at times unbearable. I suddenly realized that my movies had mostly been conceived in the depths of my soul, in my heart, my brain, my nerves, my sex, and not the least, in my guts. A nameless desire gave them birth. Another desire, which can perhaps be called "the joy of the craftsman" brought them that further step where they were displayed to the world.
I would therefore have to account for their sources, their roots and origins, and remove from their files the blurred X rays of my soul. This process would be plausible with the help of my notes and workbooks, as well as those of others; of memories recalled, newspaper articles, and especially with this seventy-year-old man's perceptive, astute, and comprehensive overview of, and objective relations to, a whole host of painful and half-suppressed experiences.
I was going to return to my films and enter their landscapes. It was a hell of a walk.
On The Seventh Seal (1957):
The final scene when Death dances off with the travelers was . . . shot at Hovs hallar [in northernmost Sweden]. We had packed up for the day because of an approaching storm. Suddenly, I caught sight of a strange cloud. [Director of photography] Gunnar Fischer hastily set the camera back into place. Several of the actors had already returned to where we were staying, so a few grips and a couple of tourists danced in their place, having no idea what it was all about. The image that later became famous of the Dance of Death beneath the dark cloud was improvised in only a few minutes.
That's how things can happen on the set. We made the film in thirty-five days.
The Seventh Seal is one of the few films really close to my heart. Actually, I don't know why. It's certainly far from perfect. I had to contend with all sorts of madness, and one can detect here and there the speed with which it was made. But I find it even, strong, and vital. Furthermore, in this film I passionately cultivated my theme to the fullest.
Since at this time I was still very much in a quandary over religious faith, I placed my two opposing beliefs side by side, allowing each to state its case in its own way. In this manner, a virtual cease-fire could exist between my childhood piety and my newfound harsh rationalism . . .
The Seventh Seal doesn't chafe anywhere.
But I had recklessly dared to do what I wouldn't dare to do today. The knight performs his morning prayer. When he is ready to pack up his chess set, he turns around, and there stands Death. "Who are you?" asks the knight. "I am Death."
[Actor] Bengt Ekerot and I agreed that Death should have the features of a white clown. An amalgamation of a clown mask and a skull.
It was a delicate and dangerous artistic move, which could have failed. Suddenly, an actor appears in whiteface, dressed all in black, and announces that he is Death. Everyone accepted the dramatic feat that he was Death, instead of saying, "Come on now, don't try to put something over us! You can't fool us! We can see that you are just a talented actor who is painted white and clad in black! You're not Death at all!" But nobody protested. That made me feel triumphant and joyous.
On Wild Strawberries (1958):
In the course of some insignificant media event, I explained that only later had I discovered what the name of the leading character–Isak Borg–really meant. Like most statements made to the media, this is the kind of untruth that fits into the series of more or less clever evasions that create an interview. Isak Borg equals me. I B equals Ice and Borg (the Swedish word for fortress). Simple and facile. I had created a figure who, on the outside, looked like my father but was me, through and through. I was then thirty-seven, cut off from all human relations. It was I who had done the cutting off, presumably an act of self-affirmation. I was a loner, a failure, I mean a complete failure. Though successful. And clever. And orderly. And disciplined.
I was looking for my father and my mother, but I could not find them. In the final scene of Wild Strawberries there is a strong element of nostalgia and desire: Sara takes Isak Borg by the hand and leads him to a sunlit clearing in the forest. On the other side he can see his parents. They wave to him.
One thread goes through the story in multiple variations: shortcomings, poverty, emptiness, and the absence of grace. I didn't know then, and even today I don't know fully, how through Wild Strawberries I was pleading with my parents: see me, understand me, and–if possible–forgive me."
On Persona (1966):
The following was written on Ornö [an outer island of the Stockholm archipelago] in May [1963]. I am getting close to the gist and core of both Persona and 'The Snakeskin' [a searching essay that Bergman had written on accepting a prize earlier that year]:
"Mrs. Vogler [the actress character to be played in Persona by Liv Ullman] desires the truth. She has looked for it everywhere, and sometimes she seems to have found something to hold on to, something lasting, but then suddenly the ground has given way under her feet. The truth had dissolved and disappeared or had, in the worst case, turned into a lie.
My art cannot melt, transform, or forget: the boy in the photo with his hands in the air or the man who set himself on fire to bear witness to his faith.
I am unable to grasp the large catastrophes. They leave my heart untouched. At most I can read about such atrocities with a kind of greed–a pornography of horror. But I shall never rid myself of those images. Images that turn my art into a bag of tricks, into something indifferent, meaningless. The question is whether art has any possibility of surviving except as an alternative to other leisure activities: these inflections, these circus tricks, all this nonsense, this puffed-up self-satisfaction. If in spite of this I continue my work as an artist, I will no longer do it as an escape or as an adult game but in the full awareness that I am working within an accepted convention that, on a few rare occasions, can give me and my fellow beings a few seconds of solace or reflection. The main task of my profession is, when all is said and done, to support me, and, as long as nobody seriously questions this fact, I shall continue, by a pure survival instinct, to keep working.
"Then I felt that every inflection of my voice, every word in my mouth, was a lie, a play whose sole purpose was to cover emptiness and boredom. There was only one way I could avoid a state of despair and a breakdown. To be silent. And to reach behind the silence for clarity or at least try to collect the resources that might still be available to me."
Here, in the diary of Mrs Vogler, lies the foundation of Persona. These were new thoughts to me. I had never foreseen that my activities had a direct relation to society or to the world . . .
At some time or other, I said that Persona saved my life–that is no exaggeration. If I had not found the strength to make that film, I would probably have been finished. One significant point: for the first time I did not care in the least whether the result would be a commercial success. The gospel according to which one must be comprehensible at all costs, one that had been dinned into me ever since I worked as the lowliest manuscript slave at Svensk Filmindustri, could finally go to hell (which is where it belongs!).
Today I feel that in Persona–and later in Cries and Whispers–I had gone as far as I could go. And that in these two instances, when working in total freedom, I touched wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover.